Saturday’s pancake breakfast fundraiser and anniversary celebration was a rousing success, despite the drizzly forecast!
The Golden Food Bank’s Food Recovery Program is run through partnerships with local businesses and provincial food bank networks who have food that is still safe to eat but can no longer be sold. Food is also transported from larger food banks in urban centers.
All items are carefully inspected using guidelines provided by Food Banks Canada for distributing donated food that may be past its best before date. Any food that is not distributed to humans is passed on to local farmers to feed their livestock.
365,000 kgs of food has been rescued from the landfill over the years, and instead used to help feed our community. The total value of this incredible volume of food was over $2 million dollars (using food valuations provided each year by Food Banks Canada).
We celebrated Wolfgang Vogt, a former chef who worked at our local Save On Foods (or Overwaitea for the old-timers!) after his retirement, and pioneered the Food Recovery program back in 2014. He saw food that was going to waste, and he did something about it!
Eddie and Jerry Leigan have been picking up recovered food from our local retailers nearly every day for 10 years running, making sure food makes it from Point A to Point B in time to go on our shelves for distribution. That’s a lot of heavy lifting!
We were happy to celebrate our Food Recovery Partners who take the time to set aside food to donate. Andrew and his team at Save On Foods supply us 7 days a week, and our core program simply wouldn’t be sustainable without them, as well as Daley Bread, Mushroom Will and IGA who are all active and generous contributors.
Joan and her volunteer team at Trinity Lutheran Church pick up from IGA every week for their basement food program. They are absolutely part of the Food Recovery story in Golden, and we were happy to have Joan join the event and help celebrate.
The Town of Golden & CSRD have jointly committed $20k towards the Food Recovery program this year from the Economic Opportunity Fund, and we are in the home stretch of fundraising for a EV Cargo Van that is set to arrive this summer, that will help us expand the program and make it even more economical to operate. CBT has funded 75% of the purchase of the van through their Non-profit SMART grants.
